We found that culture/person
exchanges are mediated not only by language, visual means or actions but also,
at a subconscious level, by an affectively charged conglomerate of
representations, figures and experiential memories that we called background
thinking. When a person speaks or thinks about any meaningful group, men,
women, Black, White or whatever, the content of emotional memories, desires,
interests is subconsciously activated at the periphery of consciousness.

We could describe background
thinking in the area of personal and social identity, as a compression,
experienced subconsciously, of all the contexts in which words,
representations, or actions dealing with Self, Alter and society have occurred
under conditions of affective arousal. When we display this “compressed
material” through the method of representational contextualization, we find an invariant
structure that I have called the affective-representational circuit, and the
content of this structure, evolves in a continuous resonance with the world.